Andrew Wiggins was among the first superstar prospects of the social media era. Born in Thornhill, Ontario just north of Toronto, Wiggins was known internationally by the time he was 13. It wasn’t always easy for the shy, small-town kid to embrace the spotlight.
After just one full season at Vaughan, Wiggins needed better competition than Canada could provide and moved on to Huntington Prep in Huntington, West Virginia — a relatively new prep school set in a small, blue-collar, sports-oriented college town near Kansas.
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The head coach, Rob Fulford, had been recruiting Wiggins since he was 13, at one point watching 24 consecutive CIA Bounce games in person. “We developed a relationship with him,” Fulford said. “We recruited him harder than anyone else.”
What stood out to Fulford was the same quality that would later get the young Wiggins in trouble, which was that everything he did looked so effortless. “He could just dominate a game from a talent perspective,” Fulford says. “It just was a clear difference between Andrew and everyone else.”
But there was nothing quiet about the show Wiggins was putting on the basketball court, as Huntington quickly became the most popular high school team in the country, going from having 50 fans at a regular home game prior to his arrival to packed gyms with over 1,000 fans there to see the Canadian high school phenom with their own eyes. “A lot of people just wanted to see him play,” Rathan-Mayes says. “We tried to go and put on a show the best that we could every single night.”
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But being at the centre of the basketball universe didn’t come naturally to the quiet kid from Vaughan. After all, shyness, like athleticism, runs in the Wiggins family: Wiggins’s father, Mitchell Sr, said the reason it didn’t work at his first college, Clemson, was that “I was so quiet, you couldn’t get a whisper out of me.” While a track teammate of his mother, Marita, said, “She was very quiet, still is very quiet and very unassuming.”
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